layoffs

Essential may be at work on making an AI-focused alternative smartphone that operates mainly on voice commands, but it'll have to do so with a significantly reduced staff. Essential has confirmed that it is laying off a large portion of its staff, which Bloomberg reports amounts to roughly 30 percent of the 120-person workforce — mainly in the hardware and sales divisions.

Telltale Games has won critical praise for titles like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but that was not enough to keep the lights on. A flood of now-former employees report that Telltale is closing its doors in the near future after laying off most workers. Telltale has not officially confirmed any changes as of yet, but this looks like the end.

Qualcomm doesn't have to worry about a hostile takeover anymore, but the company is still trying to please stockholders. It previously promised to reduce costs by $1 billion, and part of that seems to be laying off a large number of employees.

Qualcomm has begun cutting 1,500 jobs in California, with some positions being eliminated in other locations as well.

Motorola has confirmed that it is laying people in its Chicago office off, though it also says "our Moto Z family will continue." Prior to this announcement, multiple people close to the company have stated that a significant portion of Moto's engineering staff in Chicago has been laid off, with a Moto Mod owner going as far as saying the "Z team in Moto was irreversibly impacted." However, Motorola says that the Moto Z line will "continue."

According to a report from The Information, Snap (of Snapchat fame) has recently laid off about two dozen people, most of which were in the content team. These firings seem to fit in line with the company's financial difficulties and overall attempts at consolidation, as well as the recent setbacks for the platform's original content.

Telltale Games is one of the most widely-known game studios in the industry, and is often credited for re-popularizing the graphic adventure genre. All of the company's titles in recent years have arrived on Android, among other platforms (like iOS, Windows, PS4, Xbox One, and some on Mac). Unfortunately, Telltale announced a 25% reduction of staff today, affecting 90 individuals.

Telltale Games CEO Pete Hawley said, "Our industry has shifted in tremendous ways over the past few years. The realities of the environment we face moving forward demand we evolve, as well, reorienting our organization with a focus on delivering fewer, better games with a smaller team." A representative for the company said the restructuring will not affect previously announced games, like the upcoming seasons for The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Game of Thrones.

The business world is a harsh place and failures to perform adequately can have painful consequences. This is the unfortunate reality that almost 3,000 ZTE employees are about to face, according to Reuters. Overall, about 5% of ZTE's global workforce will face the axe.

Speaking to Droid-life, both sources inside the company and Motorola itself confirmed today that Lenovo has conducted a brutal round of layoffs at Moto. According to DL, over 50% of Motorola's existing US staff have lost their jobs. A 20-year veteran of the company allegedly posted on Facebook that he had been laid off, so it looks like Lenovo is cutting deep at the device-maker.

One source told them that over 700 employees would be asked to leave of the over 1200 Motorola currently employs. No doubt Lenovo hopes to cut costs by integrating much of Motorola's software and hardware development into its own smartphone unit.

Amazon's Fire Phone, the logical smartphone extension of its Kindle Fire tablet series, is a dud. A combination of lackluster reviews, carrier semi-exclusivity, and most of all being tied into Amazon's app and service environment have made it more or less a total failure. The company never publishes hard data for its hardware sales, but casual observation and constant discounts (sometimes more than $500 off of the original $650 off-contract price) imply that the product has been a wash.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon isn't eager to continue in the phone market. According to the paper, "dozens" of engineers in the Lab126 hardware team have been laid off.

It's not easy being a chip and component maker in the smartphone industry and trying to turn a profit when competitors are driving the prices down to a point where an entire phone can cost somewhere around $50. It's even harder when the high-end market is being governed by a few players, the major one of whom decides to "dump" your chips and use their own for its flagship. That's Qualcomm's conundrum right now. The company, which has been a mainstay on the spec sheet of a grand majority of the Android phones we talk about here on Android Police, is hitting a rough patch — not enough to sound the alarm sirens, but enough to jeopardize the employment of thousands of its workforce.